


Becoming

by WolffyLuna



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Existential Crisis, Gen, Imagery, Madness, POV Second Person, Spiral fic, The Great Twisting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-02-22 21:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23867644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolffyLuna/pseuds/WolffyLuna
Summary: You are filled with a terror that is hard to hold. Your eyes burn, your heart pounds, and every neuron and nerve screams as it tries to process the noise into an image. The pain is nonsense, the adrenaline unnecessary, as the danger is not physical. It is a terror that you cannot solve. It is a terror that you cannot even escape.***You are so close. So close to being fully, being you, being whole and complete. To being what you have always been and what you have been infinitely waiting to be. Reality reshaping around you so that if fits you, so do not have to clumsily hack yourself into a false shape that fits its confines. Coming through, and expanding, each part of you growing and growing and repeating endlessly, units stacked on units stacked on smaller units, until you fill the observable universe, for what is the universe if it is not observed and misunderstood?
Relationships: Michael Shelley & The Distortion
Comments: 13
Kudos: 40





	Becoming

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a prompt by @75hearts. Thank you!

_It doesn’t make sense._

_It cannot make sense._

You stand on an imaginary island that has sprung itself into impossible existence, a jungle in the arctic growing in the greenhouse of nonsense and dogged spite against reality and reason, inside a building of impossible angles. The angles are impossible in that the building sags against its own weight, and it should be collapsing right on top of you, but it is not because collapse is-not-what-it-is. The angles are impossible, with squares with corner of 180 degrees, ceilings that reach up and open and open, obtuse on obtuse angle that somehow fold back into roof, too close and too far at the same time.

The building is full of lies, more than the mere fact of the building and where its foundation stone lays. Figures chase you with pareidolia, dirty laundry turns into your dead cat in the corner of your eye and back to dirty laundry (and why is dirty laundry here? Why is your dead cat here?) Truth and falsehood curl up in a sweet embrace that you can only brush against with metaphor. Moths with eyespots that blink; milk and coral snakes entwined and entwined and entwined and infinitely long; statues gilt with pyrite and gold and gold-pyrite, flashing silver and orange and silver-orange. Your own face staring out at you from an EU standard electrical socket.

It’s worse than you can explain. Worse than you can comprehend. Because the problem is located within your comprehension. You cannot understand what is happening, separate truth from falsehood, metaphor from objective fact. The snakes could be there, or they could be scarves, and you have no way to tell.

And you cannot act. Because if you assume what you see and hear and smell and feel beneath your feet is false, it will smile it’s pareidolia smile and it will all be true. And if you assume it is true, you will walk out of the building onto an imaginary balcony and crash to the ground.

It fills you with a terror that is hard to hold. Your eyes burn, your heart pounds, and every neuron and nerve screams as it tries to process the noise into an image. The pain is nonsense, the adrenaline unnecessary, as the danger is not physical. It is a terror that you cannot solve. It is a terror that you cannot even escape. Because if this is truth, if reality is collapsing and melting and changing and never-changing, always-being-this-way around, what could you do? You cannot escape reality. You cannot outrun it anymore than you could outrun gravity or green or the inevitable lie that underpins everything. And if it is all in your head, the meat of your brain failing in one of its infinitely variable and yet predictable ways, what could you do? You cannot out run yourself. How can you run, when the thing that moves your legs, the thing that tells you that you are running, is the thing you cannot trust?

You are running anyway. You are standing perfectly still. You aren’t sure anymore. Your breath comes fast like you just ran a mile, but you cannot feel your feet, or else you’re not sure they are strictly speaking your feet.

* * *

You are so close. So close to being fully, being you, being whole and complete. To being what you have always been and what you have been infinitely waiting to be. Reality reshaping around you so that if fits _you_ , so do not have to clumsily hack yourself into a false shape that fits its confines. Coming through, and expanding, each part of you growing and growing and repeating endlessly, units stacked on units stacked on smaller units, until you fill the observable universe, for what is the universe if it is not observed and misunderstood?

You can taste it.

You cannot taste it, because taste is a metaphor and soon you will no longer have to deal in metaphors, just resplendent fear and deception and endless feast of finally being _you_.

* * *

A hand is laid on your shoulder.

You jump, startled, unsure of whether you fear something unfriendly laying a hand on you more, or turning to find nothing there at all, your surprise being in response to false stimulus.

It is Gertrude, looking up at you. Calm. Steely, maybe.

You do not doubt her, her existence, nor her calm. You cannot doubt her. She is one thing you can hold onto. If anyone understands, if anyone can see through the truth to the lies (or should that be the other way around?), it’s her.

It’s not a rational belief. She’s just an old woman. A competent one, certainly. But mortal. She has no reason to comprehend this more than you do.

But you are not feeling rational at the moment. You will take what calm and what comfort you can get.

“Michael,” she says, calm, and firm in a way you only occasionally hear her be. But you like it. She isn’t telling you to be calm, because how could you be calm that at a time like this, and it’s not like you can do that on _command_ , but she is staying steady and hoping you grab that anchor. “I need your help.”

You want to curl up in a little ball, close your eyes, and pray that the world stops. You might be doing that right now. Your senses don’t deny it. “I can’t.”

“The world is at stake.”

And that makes it worse. If the world is relying on you, it is already lost. Doomed by your own inadequacy in the face of— _this_. Paralysed by your worst fear, kicking at yourself to be stronger, but how can you be strong in the face of this doubt? How could use strength in this context? “ _I can’t.”_

“I can show you the way.” Her voice is steel, but steel is comforting. Something solid and hard in a world that has gone soft and too malleable around you.

You cannot save the world, not like this. But you can follow instructions. Trust Gertrude over your lying eyes.

She hands you a map.

You laugh, the sound echoing and bouncing off the walls. You can follow a map.

You stand, and move forward.

Maps are always lies. Pretty primary colour lines that ignore the twists of the tunnels and the layout of the streets above them. Fractal rivers compressed into neat little oxbows. But they are lies _that you can use_. They are not the truth, but you can use them to find it.

* * *

You feel a stir inside you. Servants of It-Knows-You, It-Sees-But-Does-Not-Understand are moving about.

You do not care. Let them watch. Let them crumple in the face of their pitiful comprehension and inadequate _knowledge_. Let them see the birth of this new world, this new reality, you, with open eyes and terrified hearts.

You relish it. It is pale in comparison of the joy of true existence, but it is pleasurable nonetheless.

Especially now that they are separated, losing sight and track of each other in your twisting insides and reality. You do not do it often, taking two people. It adds a layer of complication, the possibility they will communicate and see through deception. But when you do—the terror of losing your anchor to reality, the one person you can ask ‘did you see that?’, the terror of being separated and seeing your erstwhile friend out of the corner of your eye and then seeing that you were wrong—those have their charms, too.

It is irrelevant on this scale. But it was not like they could even hope to rise to relevance.

* * *

You follow the map, blocking everything else out. The light and colour and faces are overwhelming and meaningless, but you can understand the map. You can follow it. Its false lines make more sense than the false corridors, the mirrors that fall like water but still cut your hands when you break them, the doors that lead to doors to doors and to doors again.

There’s one door left. You stand at what the map says is the centre. (But does ‘centre’ even matter, is it even true?) And there is a single door, painted yellow with ever spiralling wood grain that loops back in on itself, and a handle so black you can’t quite see its shape.

You open the door.

* * *

You crack the shell of the world, opening a hair line fracture, finally letting the true-false light in, letting yourself in.

* * *

You see it. You see it, and you weep with the beauty and horror of it. The unshaped thing, both human and trick of the light and beyond both of those things. The light and fractals that do not fit into the world, that are reshaping the world to fit to it, that glow with a light so bright it is past white into rainbow, a thing that unfold and unfolds and infinitely unfolds.

* * *

You see it. You see its insignificance, the pale fear of single person like a guttering candle. The servant of the Eye that cannot see any more—no, more than that. It is trying desperately not to see what is in front of its eyes, to not witness.

A mere human, nothing compared the glory growing with in you. Mere coal for the fire, anything that it once was crushed down to carbon, only useful for fuel.

* * *

You see it.

You crack the shell.

And the other becomes you.

It is transcendent. It is terrifying. It’s electric becoming courses through your bones, its ever spiralling deceit spilling into you, and it is ecstatic. Not the pale ecstasy of mere religion, the ecstasy of a god coming into you, of you being brought up to a higher state than you could ever have dreamed of, godhead in mortal flesh. The wrongness of it breaks you. Reality made up of mere tricks of the light and air currents, that all eyes and ears in the world try to shape into meaning, and get it wrong. You are going mad. You are becoming madness. And you cannot stop it.

It is painful. Your becoming ripped away, as you are forced into a shell once more, a human shell, a shell even more confining than the world. That glory rushes away from you, rips apart from you, and it is all the more painful for having touched it at all. Your godhood stripped away from you at the worst possible moment. And you are scared. You shouldn’t be scared. You are fear, you cannot be frightened. But you are going mad, you are becoming a being of madness and that is worst thing that could happen, the horror of becoming someone else, becoming a monster—and those aren’t your own feelings, they are the feeling of that human, who fears you and who cannot understand.

And then, you realise the fear of becoming someone else. Of becoming you. Of becoming human. Of becoming the Distortion. Of being denied your apotheosis. Of being denied your sanity, that thing you held tight in gripped fingers in the hope it would not slip out of them.

You run to yourself, to your corridors, in the vain hope that you can escape yourself, your double failure, a sacrifice chained to a god, neither of which wishes to be the other.

But you cannot run from yourself.


End file.
